Thanksgiving (gratitude)

Thanksgiving, the offering of gratitude to God for blessings received, is a fundamental element of religious devotion across the traditions, standing alongside petition, praise and confession as one of the basic movements of prayer. Where petition asks and confession repents, thanksgiving acknowledges what has been given, returning to the divine source the recognition of its gifts. The impulse to give thanks pervades the scriptures and worship of the biblical religions: the Psalms overflow with thanksgiving, the Apostle Paul instructs Christians to give thanks in all circumstances, and Jewish tradition surrounds the whole of daily life with blessings that acknowledge God as the giver of food, of natural wonders, of life itself, so that gratitude becomes a nearly constant discipline of awareness.

Gratitude is treated in many traditions not merely as a fitting response but as a spiritual discipline that shapes the one who practises it, cultivating humility, contentment and a recognition of dependence on the divine, and countering the pride and forgetfulness that take blessings for granted. Islam gives thankfulness, shukr, a central place, contrasting the grateful servant with the ungrateful and promising increase to those who give thanks; the traditions of India cultivate gratitude to the divine, to teachers and to all that sustains life. Communal harvest thanksgivings, days set apart to acknowledge divine providence, and the constant small thanksgivings woven into daily religious life all express the conviction that a right relation to the divine begins with the recognition that what one has is received rather than merely possessed. In recent times the religious discipline of gratitude has also been taken up in secular and psychological forms, studied and cultivated for its effects on wellbeing, in a partial migration of an ancient practice into new settings.

Gratitude moved from a devotional habit into a subject of clinical study at the end of the twentieth century, when psychologists Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough ran controlled trials asking participants to keep a weekly list of things they were grateful for and compared them against groups recording hassles or neutral events. The gratitude groups reported measurably higher wellbeing, better sleep and more optimism over weeks, and the finding launched a research programme, and a popular industry of gratitude journals and apps, that treats thankfulness as a trainable skill rather than a feeling that either arrives or does not. The parallel to the older religious practices is closer than the secular framing usually admits: a fixed daily list, repeated whether or not the mood cooperates, is structurally the same discipline as a hundred blessings a day, only stripped of the addressee. That stripping is itself a point of contention.

Some positive psychologists argue gratitude works partly because it is relational, an act of acknowledging a giver, and that a list with no one to thank is a thinner version of the practice than a blessing addressed to God or a letter written to a specific benefactor, a format Martin Seligman's gratitude-letter exercise restored deliberately. Others maintain the effect holds regardless of addressee. Corporate and educational adoption of gratitude exercises, now common in workplaces and schools, has drawn criticism from writers who see a coping technique being asked to substitute for changes to the conditions that make thanks hard to feel in the first place, an objection with an old religious echo in warnings against thanksgiving offered as mere words.